Mars Colony: Elon Musk's Plan To Send Humans To Red Planet

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk answers questions in front of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft Wednesday June 13, 2012 at the SpaceX Rocket Development Facility in McGregor, Texas. The spacecraft recently made history as the first commercial vehicle to visit the International Space Station. The California-based SpaceX is the first private business to send a cargo ship to the space station. (AP Photo/Waco Tribune-Herald, Duane A. Laverty)

We’ve heard the news: Elon Musk wants to send us all to Mars. For $500,000 each. At a rate of 80,000 a year. Opinions are scattered -- is he visionary? Is he crazy? But for the more curious among us, another question has come up: how do you build a human-safe colony on Mars? And how is Elon Musk planning on doing it?

Groundwork for the Martian home would begin with a focus on building transparent domes pressurized with CO2, while possibly covered in a layer of water to serve as protection from the Sun. Additional trips to the Red Planet would bring equipment that could help to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen using the atmosphere’s natural elements of nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

Still, experts say he’s right to be hopeful. Experiments have revealed that algae can grow in environments only slightly altered from Mars’s current state. And scientists say that it will only take a little mankind-induced global warming to create an atmosphere suitable for heartier plant growth. Explains WiseGeek:

The current average temperature on Mars is -51°F (−46°C), with lows of -125°F (−87°C), meaning that all water and much carbon dioxide is permanently frozen. The easiest way to raise the temperature seems to be by introducing large quantities of CFCs — chlorofluorocarbons, a highly effective greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere, which could be done by sending rockets filled with compressed CFCs on a collision course with Mars. After impact, the CFCs would drift throughout Mars' atmosphere, causing a greenhouse effect which would raise the temperature, leading CO2 to sublimate and further continuing the warming and atmospheric buildup.

Even a warmed-over red planet may take years or even decades to develop into a fully earthlike environment -- but with settlers on the surface, plants in the ground, and an atmosphere growing in the sky, it’ll be a a far cry from the “fixer-upper of a planet” that Musk sees now.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article cited Talking Points Memo as saying that the Falcon Heavy rocket consists of two Falcon 9s strapped together. According to SpaceX's website, in fact 3 Falcon 9 cores comprise the Falcon Heavy.

This image provided by NASA shows the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft as it approaches the International Space Station Thursday May 24, 2012 for a series of tests to clear it for its final rendezvous and grapple on May 25. Expedition 31 Flight Engineers Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers will use the Canadarm2 robotic arm to grapple the supply ship about 8:06 a.m., Friday with the berthing to the Earth-facing side of the station's Harmony node following about 11:20 a.m. Dragon is scheduled to spend about a week docked with the station before returning to Earth on May 31 for retrieval. (AP Photo/NASA